you are thinking of racism in the wrong way. Of course the problem is not Adcoms sitting in a room saying I hate minorities so lets accept less of them. The problem is systematic racism, which is caused by explicit racism in the past that has created a lock in model, that perpetuates the power position of none minoritys. And in fact the divergence of races and sexes in fields is called, by most scholars, racism and sexism. I agree that law schools shouldn't have to in an ideal world require that their percentages exactly mirror those of the population, however the fact that 88 percent of lawyers are white is worrying to me.joeant wrote: Racism should not be a default explanation. It makes no sense, logically. There is no reason to assume that blacks and Hispanics do or should enter law school at the same rate as other groups. To illustrate my point, Asians, for example, are over-represented in engineering despite making up a tiny percentage of the population; no one would seriously contend that their representation is a product of racial biases as much as it is a matter of cultural preferences. Likewise, woman make up about 50% of the population, yet they are over-represented in fields like nursing and teaching; does anyone contend that this is a product of sexism? No. It's a product of woman preferring certain jobs. A better example still, I've been an NFL fan my entire life and I've never seen a black kicker; do you suppose that that is where white team owners draw the line? That they say to black athletes that they can play every other position on the field, except kickers because that's for us white guys? No. For whatever reason, black football players, despite being the majority in professional football, do not take up an interest in kicking at the same rate that whites do.
The bottom line is this: Simpy because 13% of the population is black and 17% is Hispanic, doesn't mean that 13% of every law school class should be black and 17% Hispanic. For one reason or another, not as many Hispanics and blacks enter the legal field and the ones that do are under-qualified. This leaves the top schools to fight over the handful of black and Hispanic applicants that do meet or almost meet their qualifications.
As to the reason I would like to see those lsat numbers: less than 50 black students, on average, get over a 165 on the lsat in any given year; Hispanics don't do much better. And, being Hispanic, I'd like to know why this is without having to resort to the lazy cop-out answer of: racism. One thing I have noticed at my law school is that many black students received a boost in lsat score of up to 15 points, and Hispanic students up to 10. But, when they share that information with me and I ask them how many times they've taken it they almost always say once. This is anecdotal, but my hypothesis is that, on the whole, black and Hispanics students do not take the lsat as many times at white students, which would,if correct, at least partially explain why whites have higher averages and blacks and Hispanics lower ones.
And your discussion on LSAT further proves why this is a racial issue, the education gap which is also systemic and institutionalized racism is likely the main cause of the difference in LSAT and GPA scores. though it is slightly better than the numbers you listed, it is still extremely low with AA and Hispanics combined make up less than 4% of all applicants that have above at least a 3.5 gpa and 165 on the lsat, this is not because of self selection, and in my view shows a complete failure of our society to meet the educational needs of minority students.